shigeru ban: building to last, just long enough
In a late night, Shigeru Ban, dressed in black as always, left his office with a big recycling-
A paper tube structure, the size of a subway car, is temporarily stuck on the top floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Imitating the shape of the glass escalator tube outside the building, the office unconsciously fits into George\'s building, where no one works, this funky rooftop restaurant, there was a large glass window facing BAN KI-MOON\'s studio and even knew it was there.
Known as the paper tube studio, it feels a bit like a Zeppelin with portholes and simple white curtains.
A dozen assistants sat at a humble table, staring silently at computers or models, working on various projects of BAN KI-MOON: a residential area in Dijon;
Headquarters of a cosmetics company in Palma;
Luxury villas in the Caribbean;
Pompidou is at Metz\'s satellite museum, which explains what BAN KI-MOON\'s office is doing on the roof of Pompidou in Paris.
Elsa Neufrille, a slim young woman wearing Converse sneakers, a mop with dark hair, supervised the construction of the studio by the volunteer team of BAN KI-MOON students, washed water from the Contrex bottle, and consider designing a paper bridge ban for Avignon.
She nodded as he left. He nodded back.
Taking the elevator down, the class took me through the spring rain for a few blocks and came to a small restaurant full of students, followed by half
Listen to his Japanese friend translate the blackboard menu.
Having been here for a few years, he doesn\'t seem to have mastered French yet.
He\'s running out of time.
Every two weeks, he goes to Tokyo and spends a few days teaching and registering in the office there, where he is responsible for a series of different projects, including the final stage of the Swatch large office building in the main shopping street of Ginza (
Open this week).
He flies to New York every month, where he has an office.
Ban Ki-moon and his New York partner, Dean Maltz, are designing a condominium tower next to the new IAC headquarters building next to the West Side Highway in Manhattan.
Judith Turner, a construction photographer who has known BAN KI-MOON for years, told me that BAN KI-MOON used to live in Russia because it was easier than adjusting his biological clock.
Now he is used to the life of the nomadic people.
This is in line with the architectural star, who is still young at the age of 49, who has not only been given a project of sustainable development or green variety.
Ban was not satisfied with the word \"green\", which he felt was vague, not to mention fashionable, although his project was often described as such.
These include (Name properly)Nomadic Museum.
Advertising made of cargo containers, stacked in a grid like a giant children\'s toy building block, the museum is a temporary structure that can be assembled almost anywhere, containers are everywhere, and it\'s easy to take apart.
A few years ago, a nomadic museum in Manhattan took over Pier 54.
Latest and largest version with 153 blue, gray, red, orange and green containers, many printed with COSTCO in white capital letters, now crouching on reclamation near Tokyo port
The spires of recycled paper tubes create inside the spires equivalent to double churches, huge hanging curtains like fine Indian silk banners decorated with entrances and exits.
They are made from recycled tea bags.
The interest of advertising bans in simple, easy-to-transport, reusable materials appears in another project that makes him famous and particularly appreciated.
In areas where humanitarian relief efforts are not common, ban designed shelters made of slender paper tubes for Rwandan refugees.
This made him a temporary home.
Cabin with paper
Pipeline Wall for victims
First, in response to the 1995-magnitude earthquake in Kobe, Japan, he also built a paper church there, and later built paper churches in Turkey and India.
He took out part of the money himself and persuaded the local company to donate materials.
In Kobe, he used the yellow plastic Kirin beer box filled with sandbags as the basis.
The average cost per house is $2,000, although its elegance is as prominent as the economy of the building.
His works are airy, curved and balanced.
The heirs of Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemayer, the heirs of traditional Japanese architecture and Al, we sat at the same table at the awards ceremony in Berlin, Ban said: \"He told his little boy to call me Sugar Bear. \".
He paused and then smiled.
In 1982, BAN KI-MOON took a year off, worked in the Tokyo office of Arata Isozaki, a famous Japanese architect, and graduated in 1984.
During his cooperation with Isozaki, he began planning an exhibition at The Axis Gallery in Tokyo.
In 1985, when he started his own practice, he did a show about Emilio Abaz.
Ban introduced a honeycomb paper panel used as a display unit like a Japanese folding screen.
He told me, \"I learned a lot from anbartz,\" he recalled a design anbartz proposed at the Sevilla Expo in 1992, which celebrated Christopher Columbus
Never built).
The location is by a river.
The plan includes a dock and a new artificial lake with pavilions on board ships docked at the dock;
Countries will design their own ships.
At the end of the Expo, the ships will return to the country where they were made and Sevilla will leave lakes and parks.
For Ban, it is (
He wouldn\'t have said that at the time)
A frugal, green idea.
He followed the Ambasz show, borrowed an exhibition about Al from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he pioneered the design of bentwood furniture and planned A-frame houses.
\"As a student,\" Ban said, \"I don\'t understand Alto, but I was surprised when I went to Finland after school.
The real architecture is completely different from what I saw in the book.
The background is crucial.
International architects believe that local materials are not important.
But I don\'t think that\'s true.
\"For the shaft show, Ban Ki-moon didn\'t have a budget to use wood, and he thought it was a waste anyway, so he made the partition.
A low-cost recycled paper tube is used to shape the design of Arto\'s Wood (
\"They\'re a lot stronger than I thought they were, and that reminds me,\" he said . \")
The tube also acts as a monitor holder.
He repeated the same design for \"Al\", but Mies used an immobile glass wall.
The House with the curtain wall was out of Ban.
Thick-skinned steel
Frame structure with two-
Story deck that stands out on the sidewalk like the ship\'s bow.
It is possible to pull a white sliding curtain around 20 feet to close the interior.
It\'s the dramatic boom of the building, the whole design, though the smallest, is like a stage set.
The curtain wall House was selected for MoMA\'s 1999 exhibition, which drew the attention of the ban, as did the newspaper
Then he designed an arch for the sculpture garden of the museum.
At about the same time, BAN KI-MOON worked with Frei Otto at the Japan Pavilion of the 2000 Hannover Expo.
\"My dream has always been to work with Otto,\" Ban recalled the German architect and engineer . \".
\"The theme of the Expo is the environment, so our goal is to recycle or reuse all our materials and keep everything low --
As much technology as possible.
\"They came up with one.
But the German authorities have never seen such a thing before, insisting it is paper and wood.
The result is a wide, towering, wavy roof, 242 feet long, 82 feet wide and 52 feet high.
It is a paper tube housing, like a string of a tennis racket, fixed by a cable.
When he designed the roof for the stadium at Odate in northeastern Japan, ban expanded the idea (
Elegant elliptical space inspired by Bernini).
In a park in St.
Louis, who overcame the inherent structural defects of bamboo, designed a lattice pavilion made of laminated bamboo, a choppy canopy that reinforced himself like the folding end of the carton.
This is related to his proposal for Pompidou in Metz (
The roof is like a Chinese hat).
He also gave great credit to the grid design of Think design, a team of architects, and Ban is part of it, which proposed a replacement for world trade in 2003.
The idea is to cross the steel grid of the footprint of the collapsed tower.
This is a ladder leading to the sky.
Ban said he was considering the Japanese tradition of holding paper boxes with candles and floating on the water as a monument to the healing of the dead.
He measured the light that shot the Hudson River from the tower at night.
\"I\'m glad we got second place at ground zero,\" he told me . \".
\"Because in the end I knew it was going to be a political mess.
At the same time, as his friend Laurie Hodgson said, Ban Ki-moon is in the mud.
On 1994, he saw a picture of the refugee camp in Rwanda: 2 million people lived in a miserable shelter.
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees provided them with plastic plates and aluminum rods to support them.
Aluminum replaced the trees, and the refugees were told to cut down the trees, but they were also using them as firewood.
Floods caused by deforestation.
The refugees simply sold aluminum and cut down more trees.
Ban proposed a document. tube structure.
\"I have no experience with such issues, but I went to Rwanda and went to see the high commissioner,\" he told me . \".
\"My timing is good.
Many companies have been trying to sell him their products to make money.
According to my proposal, if they are trained in some equipment that even Rwanda has, the tubes can be made cheaply and simply by people on site.
\"When the Kobe earthquake struck in 1995, Ban proposed temporary but more complex housing with paper and his paper Church.
He was suspected.
\"The priest does not believe me,\" Ban said . \".
\"So I go to service every week.
At last he said O. K.
If I raise money
In the meantime, I\'m going to the park in Kobe, where Vietnamese refugees who lost their homes in the earthquake live in a shantytown.
It\'s terrible, but they don\'t want to move to government housing outside the city, because that way they can\'t get back to work in town.
I built the first temporary house at my own expense.
The priest saw it and then he gave me more money for the house but still didn\'t give it to his own church.
We built 28.
Of course, the church was eventually built by BAN KI-MOON.
It\'s been standing for 10 years.
Established in Taiwan this spring.
Waterproof sponge tape fills the gap between paper tubes.
The canvas roof provides shade for hot weather.
Like shelters in Rwanda, these houses can be assembled by anyone, just like erector set.
When an earthquake struck western Turkey, ban adjusted his logcabin scheme.
He persuaded a Japanese company to donate plastic cloth with the company\'s logo, which was a good publicity for the sanctuary when it was broadcast on television.
Local Turkish companies have donated beer boxes and paper tubes.
A Turkish architect warned him that Turks accustomed to brick houses would not be open to paper houses.
\"But this reaction is very attractive,\" Ban said . \"
\"People say they feel more comfortable in paper houses because the concrete and brick houses have collapsed and people are killed while sleeping.
Paper houses will not fall on them in the middle of the night.
He changed the log in Sri Lanka.
Mud cabin design-
Cement brick house with wooden furniture wall.
They include rooms that are open to the streets so that people can continue to run their business at their doorstep;
He divided the interior so that, as religious Muslims, the women disappeared when the husband had male visitors.
\"In India, I used woven rattan mats on the roof because they were there because there was no beer box, so we used the mud of the broken bricks and the concrete of the destroyed building, BAN KI-MOON went on to say.
\"Fortunately, the local industry is textiles, and of course, textiles are wrapped in paper tubes.
\"There is no boundary between these projects and my other projects,\" he continued . \".
\"I have always been interested in developing new structures or material systems and adapting them to specific environments.
That\'s how the new architecture came about.
Style and Fashion. High-
Technology buildings, all these acrobatic buildings today, use over-designed materials and methods.
My impulse is always simplified and clarified.
\"Before I left Tokyo, I stopped by to see the Togolese Ji Zi, who commissioned BAN KI-MOON to design a low
Multi-purpose building.
Togo is an art dealer with Warren, a gallery on the first floor, packed with Picassos.
Ban designed a clever sliding wall system for it to hide floating shelves.
Two floors-
Through the apartment upstairs
This building is three.
The story glass cube that Ban calls Ivy Structure 2.
When I asked about Ivy, Togo turned its eyes.
\"It didn\'t work, Shigeru proposed to cover the walls with artificial ivy, but I said no, I\'m an art dealer and I don\'t run fakes.
\"The building is diagonally across the street, with triangular gaps that provide space for the garden and the balcony.
The ad in the suit was good and Togo took off their shoes and showed me the apartment: tall open space, trees planted on the terrace blocked the huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
\"I like this because I feel outside when I\'m inside,\" she said . \".
\"This is a modern interpretation of the Japanese way of thinking.
We believe that life is unsustainable without nature.
We wrote a poem about it.
Buddhist monks live on the mountain and they can open the door and let the wind blow in.
Ban is doing the same thing here in a very practical way.
\"This philosophy guides other projects, such as the paper art museum, two elegant glass --and-
Steel box connected by thin glass film of the roof, the wall is made of closed glass, leading to the outdoor.
In the new Swatch Tower, a similar device raised the entire facade and rear, turning the upper floor of the building into a middle Street with trees and planting inside
In the bare house in the middle of the rice field, the walls also slide open.
Everything is flexible.
Inside there are four huge casters boxes, open on both sides, which can be used as an activity room with tatami mat floor.
They can be pushed together or connected to the air
Air conditioning or push to the window.
Ban told me it was \"very Japanese\" because the client did not care about privacy.
\"I was reminded that there is no word for privacy in Japan.
I found a model for this transparent method in BAN KI-MOON\'s most luxurious house, home E, which traveled north two hours by train from Tokyo along the coast, through rice fields and shopping malls.
The owner\'s home of a fashion company, $5 million, 12,900-square-
Foot Palace, with swimming pool, bamboo garden, Gion, Moss Garden, all spaces are in a complex that is open to each other, sliding glass walls that combine nature with architecture, private and shared spaces.
All white and glass, softened by planting and wooden blinds and subtle geometry, look perfect.
While I was there, several employees in turquoise uniforms were vacuuming, which was clearly a daunting task.
The golf driving range on the second floor relieved this aesthetic to some extent, and emphasized a conspicuous consumption that was partly compensated for by a residential area next door.
The boss of the fashion company commissioned BAN KI-MOON to design for the company\'s female workers.
An apartment building with a breeze studio and a large public space where you can cook and watch TV.
It is called the Socialist hanechenlin.
It feels like there\'s still a long way to go from paper
But that\'s not the case.
BAN KI-MOON followed the same principles in all his work.
Once, when asked what he had learned from Alto, he said, \"give comfort to people.
\"Architects build monuments for their self or help developers,\" he went on to say . \".
\"It\'s part of what we do, and it\'s what I do --make monuments.
But they need to do more to serve the society.
This is also the responsibility of the architect.
I think we have a responsibility at all stages of the process.
\"A version of this article was published in the International Herald Tribune on May 22, 2007.
Order reprint | today\'s newspaper | subscribe we are interested in your feedback on this page.
Tell us what you think.
A paper tube structure, the size of a subway car, is temporarily stuck on the top floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Imitating the shape of the glass escalator tube outside the building, the office unconsciously fits into George\'s building, where no one works, this funky rooftop restaurant, there was a large glass window facing BAN KI-MOON\'s studio and even knew it was there.
Known as the paper tube studio, it feels a bit like a Zeppelin with portholes and simple white curtains.
A dozen assistants sat at a humble table, staring silently at computers or models, working on various projects of BAN KI-MOON: a residential area in Dijon;
Headquarters of a cosmetics company in Palma;
Luxury villas in the Caribbean;
Pompidou is at Metz\'s satellite museum, which explains what BAN KI-MOON\'s office is doing on the roof of Pompidou in Paris.
Elsa Neufrille, a slim young woman wearing Converse sneakers, a mop with dark hair, supervised the construction of the studio by the volunteer team of BAN KI-MOON students, washed water from the Contrex bottle, and consider designing a paper bridge ban for Avignon.
She nodded as he left. He nodded back.
Taking the elevator down, the class took me through the spring rain for a few blocks and came to a small restaurant full of students, followed by half
Listen to his Japanese friend translate the blackboard menu.
Having been here for a few years, he doesn\'t seem to have mastered French yet.
He\'s running out of time.
Every two weeks, he goes to Tokyo and spends a few days teaching and registering in the office there, where he is responsible for a series of different projects, including the final stage of the Swatch large office building in the main shopping street of Ginza (
Open this week).
He flies to New York every month, where he has an office.
Ban Ki-moon and his New York partner, Dean Maltz, are designing a condominium tower next to the new IAC headquarters building next to the West Side Highway in Manhattan.
Judith Turner, a construction photographer who has known BAN KI-MOON for years, told me that BAN KI-MOON used to live in Russia because it was easier than adjusting his biological clock.
Now he is used to the life of the nomadic people.
This is in line with the architectural star, who is still young at the age of 49, who has not only been given a project of sustainable development or green variety.
Ban was not satisfied with the word \"green\", which he felt was vague, not to mention fashionable, although his project was often described as such.
These include (Name properly)Nomadic Museum.
Advertising made of cargo containers, stacked in a grid like a giant children\'s toy building block, the museum is a temporary structure that can be assembled almost anywhere, containers are everywhere, and it\'s easy to take apart.
A few years ago, a nomadic museum in Manhattan took over Pier 54.
Latest and largest version with 153 blue, gray, red, orange and green containers, many printed with COSTCO in white capital letters, now crouching on reclamation near Tokyo port
The spires of recycled paper tubes create inside the spires equivalent to double churches, huge hanging curtains like fine Indian silk banners decorated with entrances and exits.
They are made from recycled tea bags.
The interest of advertising bans in simple, easy-to-transport, reusable materials appears in another project that makes him famous and particularly appreciated.
In areas where humanitarian relief efforts are not common, ban designed shelters made of slender paper tubes for Rwandan refugees.
This made him a temporary home.
Cabin with paper
Pipeline Wall for victims
First, in response to the 1995-magnitude earthquake in Kobe, Japan, he also built a paper church there, and later built paper churches in Turkey and India.
He took out part of the money himself and persuaded the local company to donate materials.
In Kobe, he used the yellow plastic Kirin beer box filled with sandbags as the basis.
The average cost per house is $2,000, although its elegance is as prominent as the economy of the building.
His works are airy, curved and balanced.
The heirs of Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemayer, the heirs of traditional Japanese architecture and Al, we sat at the same table at the awards ceremony in Berlin, Ban said: \"He told his little boy to call me Sugar Bear. \".
He paused and then smiled.
In 1982, BAN KI-MOON took a year off, worked in the Tokyo office of Arata Isozaki, a famous Japanese architect, and graduated in 1984.
During his cooperation with Isozaki, he began planning an exhibition at The Axis Gallery in Tokyo.
In 1985, when he started his own practice, he did a show about Emilio Abaz.
Ban introduced a honeycomb paper panel used as a display unit like a Japanese folding screen.
He told me, \"I learned a lot from anbartz,\" he recalled a design anbartz proposed at the Sevilla Expo in 1992, which celebrated Christopher Columbus
Never built).
The location is by a river.
The plan includes a dock and a new artificial lake with pavilions on board ships docked at the dock;
Countries will design their own ships.
At the end of the Expo, the ships will return to the country where they were made and Sevilla will leave lakes and parks.
For Ban, it is (
He wouldn\'t have said that at the time)
A frugal, green idea.
He followed the Ambasz show, borrowed an exhibition about Al from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he pioneered the design of bentwood furniture and planned A-frame houses.
\"As a student,\" Ban said, \"I don\'t understand Alto, but I was surprised when I went to Finland after school.
The real architecture is completely different from what I saw in the book.
The background is crucial.
International architects believe that local materials are not important.
But I don\'t think that\'s true.
\"For the shaft show, Ban Ki-moon didn\'t have a budget to use wood, and he thought it was a waste anyway, so he made the partition.
A low-cost recycled paper tube is used to shape the design of Arto\'s Wood (
\"They\'re a lot stronger than I thought they were, and that reminds me,\" he said . \")
The tube also acts as a monitor holder.
He repeated the same design for \"Al\", but Mies used an immobile glass wall.
The House with the curtain wall was out of Ban.
Thick-skinned steel
Frame structure with two-
Story deck that stands out on the sidewalk like the ship\'s bow.
It is possible to pull a white sliding curtain around 20 feet to close the interior.
It\'s the dramatic boom of the building, the whole design, though the smallest, is like a stage set.
The curtain wall House was selected for MoMA\'s 1999 exhibition, which drew the attention of the ban, as did the newspaper
Then he designed an arch for the sculpture garden of the museum.
At about the same time, BAN KI-MOON worked with Frei Otto at the Japan Pavilion of the 2000 Hannover Expo.
\"My dream has always been to work with Otto,\" Ban recalled the German architect and engineer . \".
\"The theme of the Expo is the environment, so our goal is to recycle or reuse all our materials and keep everything low --
As much technology as possible.
\"They came up with one.
But the German authorities have never seen such a thing before, insisting it is paper and wood.
The result is a wide, towering, wavy roof, 242 feet long, 82 feet wide and 52 feet high.
It is a paper tube housing, like a string of a tennis racket, fixed by a cable.
When he designed the roof for the stadium at Odate in northeastern Japan, ban expanded the idea (
Elegant elliptical space inspired by Bernini).
In a park in St.
Louis, who overcame the inherent structural defects of bamboo, designed a lattice pavilion made of laminated bamboo, a choppy canopy that reinforced himself like the folding end of the carton.
This is related to his proposal for Pompidou in Metz (
The roof is like a Chinese hat).
He also gave great credit to the grid design of Think design, a team of architects, and Ban is part of it, which proposed a replacement for world trade in 2003.
The idea is to cross the steel grid of the footprint of the collapsed tower.
This is a ladder leading to the sky.
Ban said he was considering the Japanese tradition of holding paper boxes with candles and floating on the water as a monument to the healing of the dead.
He measured the light that shot the Hudson River from the tower at night.
\"I\'m glad we got second place at ground zero,\" he told me . \".
\"Because in the end I knew it was going to be a political mess.
At the same time, as his friend Laurie Hodgson said, Ban Ki-moon is in the mud.
On 1994, he saw a picture of the refugee camp in Rwanda: 2 million people lived in a miserable shelter.
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees provided them with plastic plates and aluminum rods to support them.
Aluminum replaced the trees, and the refugees were told to cut down the trees, but they were also using them as firewood.
Floods caused by deforestation.
The refugees simply sold aluminum and cut down more trees.
Ban proposed a document. tube structure.
\"I have no experience with such issues, but I went to Rwanda and went to see the high commissioner,\" he told me . \".
\"My timing is good.
Many companies have been trying to sell him their products to make money.
According to my proposal, if they are trained in some equipment that even Rwanda has, the tubes can be made cheaply and simply by people on site.
\"When the Kobe earthquake struck in 1995, Ban proposed temporary but more complex housing with paper and his paper Church.
He was suspected.
\"The priest does not believe me,\" Ban said . \".
\"So I go to service every week.
At last he said O. K.
If I raise money
In the meantime, I\'m going to the park in Kobe, where Vietnamese refugees who lost their homes in the earthquake live in a shantytown.
It\'s terrible, but they don\'t want to move to government housing outside the city, because that way they can\'t get back to work in town.
I built the first temporary house at my own expense.
The priest saw it and then he gave me more money for the house but still didn\'t give it to his own church.
We built 28.
Of course, the church was eventually built by BAN KI-MOON.
It\'s been standing for 10 years.
Established in Taiwan this spring.
Waterproof sponge tape fills the gap between paper tubes.
The canvas roof provides shade for hot weather.
Like shelters in Rwanda, these houses can be assembled by anyone, just like erector set.
When an earthquake struck western Turkey, ban adjusted his logcabin scheme.
He persuaded a Japanese company to donate plastic cloth with the company\'s logo, which was a good publicity for the sanctuary when it was broadcast on television.
Local Turkish companies have donated beer boxes and paper tubes.
A Turkish architect warned him that Turks accustomed to brick houses would not be open to paper houses.
\"But this reaction is very attractive,\" Ban said . \"
\"People say they feel more comfortable in paper houses because the concrete and brick houses have collapsed and people are killed while sleeping.
Paper houses will not fall on them in the middle of the night.
He changed the log in Sri Lanka.
Mud cabin design-
Cement brick house with wooden furniture wall.
They include rooms that are open to the streets so that people can continue to run their business at their doorstep;
He divided the interior so that, as religious Muslims, the women disappeared when the husband had male visitors.
\"In India, I used woven rattan mats on the roof because they were there because there was no beer box, so we used the mud of the broken bricks and the concrete of the destroyed building, BAN KI-MOON went on to say.
\"Fortunately, the local industry is textiles, and of course, textiles are wrapped in paper tubes.
\"There is no boundary between these projects and my other projects,\" he continued . \".
\"I have always been interested in developing new structures or material systems and adapting them to specific environments.
That\'s how the new architecture came about.
Style and Fashion. High-
Technology buildings, all these acrobatic buildings today, use over-designed materials and methods.
My impulse is always simplified and clarified.
\"Before I left Tokyo, I stopped by to see the Togolese Ji Zi, who commissioned BAN KI-MOON to design a low
Multi-purpose building.
Togo is an art dealer with Warren, a gallery on the first floor, packed with Picassos.
Ban designed a clever sliding wall system for it to hide floating shelves.
Two floors-
Through the apartment upstairs
This building is three.
The story glass cube that Ban calls Ivy Structure 2.
When I asked about Ivy, Togo turned its eyes.
\"It didn\'t work, Shigeru proposed to cover the walls with artificial ivy, but I said no, I\'m an art dealer and I don\'t run fakes.
\"The building is diagonally across the street, with triangular gaps that provide space for the garden and the balcony.
The ad in the suit was good and Togo took off their shoes and showed me the apartment: tall open space, trees planted on the terrace blocked the huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
\"I like this because I feel outside when I\'m inside,\" she said . \".
\"This is a modern interpretation of the Japanese way of thinking.
We believe that life is unsustainable without nature.
We wrote a poem about it.
Buddhist monks live on the mountain and they can open the door and let the wind blow in.
Ban is doing the same thing here in a very practical way.
\"This philosophy guides other projects, such as the paper art museum, two elegant glass --and-
Steel box connected by thin glass film of the roof, the wall is made of closed glass, leading to the outdoor.
In the new Swatch Tower, a similar device raised the entire facade and rear, turning the upper floor of the building into a middle Street with trees and planting inside
In the bare house in the middle of the rice field, the walls also slide open.
Everything is flexible.
Inside there are four huge casters boxes, open on both sides, which can be used as an activity room with tatami mat floor.
They can be pushed together or connected to the air
Air conditioning or push to the window.
Ban told me it was \"very Japanese\" because the client did not care about privacy.
\"I was reminded that there is no word for privacy in Japan.
I found a model for this transparent method in BAN KI-MOON\'s most luxurious house, home E, which traveled north two hours by train from Tokyo along the coast, through rice fields and shopping malls.
The owner\'s home of a fashion company, $5 million, 12,900-square-
Foot Palace, with swimming pool, bamboo garden, Gion, Moss Garden, all spaces are in a complex that is open to each other, sliding glass walls that combine nature with architecture, private and shared spaces.
All white and glass, softened by planting and wooden blinds and subtle geometry, look perfect.
While I was there, several employees in turquoise uniforms were vacuuming, which was clearly a daunting task.
The golf driving range on the second floor relieved this aesthetic to some extent, and emphasized a conspicuous consumption that was partly compensated for by a residential area next door.
The boss of the fashion company commissioned BAN KI-MOON to design for the company\'s female workers.
An apartment building with a breeze studio and a large public space where you can cook and watch TV.
It is called the Socialist hanechenlin.
It feels like there\'s still a long way to go from paper
But that\'s not the case.
BAN KI-MOON followed the same principles in all his work.
Once, when asked what he had learned from Alto, he said, \"give comfort to people.
\"Architects build monuments for their self or help developers,\" he went on to say . \".
\"It\'s part of what we do, and it\'s what I do --make monuments.
But they need to do more to serve the society.
This is also the responsibility of the architect.
I think we have a responsibility at all stages of the process.
\"A version of this article was published in the International Herald Tribune on May 22, 2007.
Order reprint | today\'s newspaper | subscribe we are interested in your feedback on this page.
Tell us what you think.
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